The mealybug Ferrisia gilli Gullan is a serious new pest of pistachios in California. It was first found near the town of Tulare in the late 1990s and has since spread to orchards in most pistachio-producing regions of the state. The seasonal phenology of F. gilli was evaluated in a commercial pistachio orchard in Tulare County during 2005 and 2006. During both seasons E gilli overwintered as s...

In 1984 studies were initiated to identify the bird species causing damage to pistachio nuts, quantify the losses, and explore possible methods for alleviating bird losses. The first year's field observations were made to identify and determine the level of activity of the various depredating bird species in the orchard. Field samples of nuts were collected to assess the levels of damage occurr...

We study the fully nonlinear, nonlocal dynamics of two-dimensional vesicles in a time-dependent, incompressible viscous flow at finite temperature. We focus on a transient instability that can be observed when the direction of applied flow is suddenly reversed, which induces compressive forces on the vesicle interface, and small-scale interface perturbations known as wrinkles develop. These wri...

The soybean aphid (Aphis glycines) is one of the main insect pests of soybean (Glycine max) worldwide. Genomics approaches have provided important data on transcriptome changes, both in the insect and in the plant, in response to the plant-aphid interaction. However, the difficulties to transform soybean and to rear soybean aphid on artificial media have hindered our ability to systematically t...

Mustard (Brassica juncea L.) production in India suffers from aphid, Lipaphis erysimi (Kaltenbach), infestation considerably. Role of weather on the incidence and development of mustard aphids was assessed from experimental data from six north Indian locations. Aphid appearance and population build up was found to be regulated by temperature and time to attain peak population was relatively sho...

Soybean aphid is an economic pest of soybean in North America. Currently, management of soybean aphid is achieved through the use of foliar- and seed-applied insecticides. However, natural enemies play an important role in regulating soybean aphid populations, and may be adversely affected by insecticides. The effects of imidacloprid and thiamethoxam seed treatments on the soybean aphid parasit...

This paper presents a study on stretch-induced wrinkling of thin polyethylene sheets when subjected to uniaxial stretch with two clamped ends. Three-dimensional digital image correlation was used to measure the wrinkling deformation. It was observed that the wrinkle amplitude increased as the nominal strain increased up to around 10%, but then decreased at larger strain levels. This behavior is...

Adsorption of violet B azo dye from aqueous solutions was studied by different cellulose agricultural waste materials (almond shell (AS), pistachio shell (PS), walnut shell (WS), Tea waste (TW) and orange peel (OP)). Cellulose agriculturalwaste sorbents characterized by FTIR and SEM methods. The effects of different parameters such as contact time, pH, adsorbent dosage and initial dye concentra...

This work introduces a biochar as novel catalyst prepared from the pistachio hull, and demonstrates its catalytic potential for degrading the reactive red 198 (RR198) dye in catalytic ozonation processes (COPs). The prepared pistachio hull biochar (PHB) was a macroporous, basic material with low specific surface area. PHB had the greatest catalytic potential at an optimal alkaline pH of 10. Sig...

Classiication of real-time X-ray images of randomly oriented touching pistachio nuts is discussed. The ultimate objective is the development of a system for automated non-invasive detection of defective product items on a conveyor belt. We discuss the extraction of new features that allow better discrimination between damaged and clean items (pistachio nuts). This feature extraction and classii...